The Outlaw Album (4 page)

She says now I’m home for a while we should get married, and soon, before they send me back, but has only ever one time asked me about over there, how it was, what details I needed to get off my chest, what memories I might want to share with her, and I said, It’s all real sandy. Sand blows into everything. Makes soup even turn crunchy.

That’s it?

I think I miss the crunching.

“Put this in,” she says before my breathing is even righted, and tosses the movie my way. She raises herself to sit on the couch, then uses her blue undies to mop herself dry, catch my come seeping, and stuffs them dampened into her purse. “It’s got that guy in it I like.”

Somewhere in the flick I fell out of interest. It wasn’t funny, and the guy she liked so dodged bullets slower than pigeons and cracked wise at death, which never happened to him or his, and I yawned and went away. On the porch I stared up at the big oak in the yard. Tree frogs honked their raspy honks in unison, and fat brown bugs battered the porch light behind me. Mary’s car was under the spread limbs, and I saw that the windows had fogged. I crossed the dirt yard, opened the back door, and there slept Joe and Nora, undressed for bed but without a blanket to cover them. I pointed a finger and wrote Mary’s name in the fog above them, then rubbed their used wet breaths onto my face. They’d been there since she left the trailer and hit the first bar, and were probably asleep by the second roadhouse or the third. I picked both up at once, an arm under each, and neither child woke as I carried them inside. Mary looked over from her movie as I laid the kids on the empty end of the couch. She was smiling with her chin down and her eyes wide, and said, “See? I told you you loved them kids.”

In the story that happens to me so often, asleep or wide awake, I had got down on my hands and knees to collect red and white parts of Lt. Voorhees, from when his brain-housing unit came apart in his quarters, skull chunks denting the ceiling, teeth and ears splatted to the walls, brains a clotting spray—a story that happens to me whenever it wants to, and I can’t shunt it aside or stuff it in a box, but can only accept the sunken feelings it deals me time and again. A few times Dad showed up to help me collect the cracked bone and stringy glop, clumped hair, kneeling beside me in a foreign place, calling me “son” while we raised a wet pile. Some days I start hearing the final words Lt. Voorhees said before closing his door that night spoken over and over, at different volumes in my head, all day long, low to loud, Hope I dream about daylight again.

Hope I DREAM about daylight AGAIN.

HOPE I dream about DAYLIGHT again.

McArdle and Fuller fell by toward the next sundown, or the one after, drawn by boredom and word of my return, wanting to remember high school, with a box of beer and bowls of smoke to make it seem those years-ago days might happen again tomorrow if only we got wasted enough. I left the house with them in McArdle’s truck and we drove to the river, built a jolly campfire on a gravel beach. Their memories are cleaner than mine, the silly details yet shine for them, are easily found and spoken as jokes or boasts. My head cramps trying to only call up the faces from the hallways. I should be glad for this visit, I know, so I hunt dry wood up the slope, stack it on the fire to grow the flames, and say I am, I am glad to see you two, your faces make me feel home.

So-and-so got married, so-and-so moved away, so-and-so fell in the lake or was pushed, drunk as a skunk whichever. It takes only five minutes together before they lean close and ask the standard ghoul questions I expect from civilians, and I answer, Oh, you damned straight I did.

Then, Maybe more’n used to ride our school bus.

Then, Like tomatoes being busted open with hammers.

Then, Sometimes all you can do is shovel red sand into a body bag and send that home with a name on it.

The empties clatter into the fire, smokes mingle, dusk settles, there is laughter. I recall times together like this, drinking the day away in canoes on the river, chucking dry-ice bombs into blue holes and cheering the boom and spray, and as dark fell driving into town with more cold beer to circle the Sonic, round and round at half a mile an hour, biceps on display out the windows, hoping some town girls would of a sudden realize we were cute, kind of sexy, even, and want to go for a ride in the country, then switching to whiskey when none did.

I guess I joined to become more interesting than that.

Fuller had been our alpha, our main instigator, with showboat muscles and a habit of bruising you good in horseplay, then saying it was only a joke, bro, don’t be mad. In the firelight I can see he’d like to mess with me some again, as he did back when, give a demeaning Dutch rub, or clamp on a headlock ’til I croak “Uncle,” but he’s just not sure anymore, not sure I won’t go Kill! Kill! Kill! in my head, yank something deadly from my watch pocket, zip-cuff him to a sapling, and feed his ass to the fire a pound at a time. I can see the itch is in him, and the doubt, so I help him clear the confusion, saying, “After the desert, bro, the list of things you’re totally certain you’d
never ever do
gets a lot shorter.”

Ma’s breaths scrape together traveling her throat and have short hisses at their tail, plus something come undone in her chest clatters. Her sleep is a busy place and she speaks mushed words into the sheets, her legs walk to yesterday and back across the mattress, her eyelids totter as the eyeballs rush about in darkness, wanting to see everything they’ve ever seen again. The bed she chose for the dining room is small with no headboard, low to ground, a short fall if she rolled loose in her rambling and tumbled.

Another rough day before noon there was this cemetery in the sand, with row after row of markers for the dead, mud-colored or white, each big enough to hide behind, and a high dun wall around the whole place. We cleared one row then crept toward the next, each small distance electric with the idea that this gravestone ahead could be the one Ali Baba is hid behind and waiting, finger on the trigger or arm cocked to throw something that explodes. The air smelled of shit roasting in oil and carried that shrill music that made your skin tighten. One row at a time, crawling inch by inch, from marker to marker, the pressure building with each scoot forward, sweat dripping, hands turned white squeezing, and after several rows you heard some guys go empty, moan themselves into the dust, become still where they were, not about to move on. They make it ten, twenty, thirty rows, but can no longer imagine making it through all the rows. Each marker, each row, who knows what’s there, anything could be, you might soon become a chunky breeze exploded sideways or get shot through-and-through, and those possibilities nourished dread. Your own mind can gut you good so easy. With sprung nerves soldiers lay faces to the sand to avoid seeing ahead and had to be booted by sergeants.

Mary wanted to be a bride again and announced she soon would be while we all splashed in the river. Joe and Nora hopped on stick legs in the shallows above the one-lane bridge, and Ma sat in a folding chair with her feet under water and a scarf over her fuzz of hair. I had my goggles to hunt treasure spilled from tourist canoes upstream and had found a wristwatch with a rotted band. Mary wore a white T-shirt over her suit and said, “It’s official, y’all—me’n Darden are gettin’ hitched.”

I dove again. People riding inner tubes went by overhead, casting squat shadows that roamed over the bottom rocks and stretched with distance. Legs looked so white and puffed from underneath, with bubbles attaching to the flesh like blisters, and voices arrived as deep blurry barks.

Ma said, “When does this happen?”

“While he waits to hear about goin’ back,” Mary said. The sun was halfway west and shined at a slant that broke around her. Her face was shaded faint but the skin on her neck glowed at the sides. “I’ll get it right this time. I’ve learned some things I couldn’t’ve guessed at before.”

Joe and Nora stood still in a trickle of river, bare feet sinking into the gravel bed, staring at me, faces empty, holding themselves in tight. Mary saw and kicked water at them so they’d know it was okay to seem happy just now. They tried.

Mary unloaded a picnic onto a blanket in the shade, beer chilling in the river.

Ma said to me, “You sure this is good news?” Her eyes were mournful and ringed, like those of a hunted thing that has decided to stop running. I would paint her soon. Her chest had been cut away from her first, both sides, but she fell sick in other parts, too, and the sick didn’t rest; it prowled her body, salting her with ruin you couldn’t see in her face for a good long while. Now the ruin just stares out at me, all the time, from those eyes that know about hope and that body that can’t offer any. She leaned my way and whispered, “It’s your life, son.”

“I just don’t care to make big decisions anymore.”

“That is one.”

“Let’s act happy.”

“That’s another.”

I fell on the river and went inside. The water ran chest deep, and I spread over the rocky bottom and found a big one to cling to. There were all these tiny tatters of different debris rushing past near the bottom and the rushing was all I heard. I clung to the bottom, my feet rising behind and touching air while my hands held steady on the slickened old stone and kept me from spinning downstream. I held and held to the rock and forgot about breathing, sunk into that choice spot between breathing and not ever breathing, between raising up to walk on the bank and picnic or staying under to join that debris already lost to the rushing.

Stink from the cow took over the air. The cow was screaming again, screaming stink, a brown dirge of stink like the dead scream always. Ma and me stood on the cliff with our noses pinched against the loud stink and squinted our eyes, too. Ma’s trying to act spry so she can help. She’s wearing rubber mud boots and a long dress with no waistline and no pattern in the cloth. A big yellow sun hat shades her face.

Neither of us wants the cow kicked to the river below, to dump such ruin into the clean water, so we decide to haul it up the cliff with three ropes. I’ve backed the truck near the edge, and Ma swears she can work a clutch and drive just fine, no problem. I tied my ropes to the truck, cinched one around me snug, and led the other two down to the sideways tree. There were shrubs to grab at on the cliff face, untrustworthy roots and clumps of stranded weeds, and I tossed my feet at them to slow my falling. The sideways tree was sturdy and the cow oozed. Flying things had got the eyes, the lips and ears, the soft easy meat anything left dead in the open serves up first. I had to sit astride the cow to get the ropes looped around, the first under the front legs, the next under the back, and thickened death-juices leaked from the cow onto my jeans and shirt. I gave Ma a wave and me and the cow scraped the dusty cliff and flew up together, meat and meat under the sky, hooves whirling, boots whirling, one head down, one head raised, one spinning smell.

Ma helps me unlash and says, “You’re nuts to go back.”

“They cleared me for goin’, Ma.”

Ma drove and the cow slid across the pasture to the grassless place, and I untied it. My clothes stunk past cleaning, and I flung them off, shirt first, then jeans, and went about in my skivvies and started tossing stuff from the trash heap into the burn circle. The pile grew, and grew tall enough for a ten-foot flame to rise from household trash, old plywood, a tangle of blowdown, hedge trimmings, a busted headboard and stained mattress I couldn’t recall. I was near naked in the world and sweating, bending to drop matches, encourage the flames, scorch that stink away. Ma watched me, looking at my tats some, not too impressed by the pictures, I knew, but mostly studying the long ragged divot torn top to bottom on my back and wondering what invention made that wound.

“She found out how much you’re worth dead.”

“Where?”

“She’s been askin’ folks all around.”

We stood close together fireside, watching the cow burn in the circle as the sun sank. The cow only slightly thinned, but the brain-housing unit was soon laid bare and white atop deep glowing coals. Hooves cracked in the heat. Full dark made fire seem the center of all things. A breeze raised little flames that wiggled in the eye sockets and stuck a long tongue of fire lapping from the mouth. Ma’n me stared silently ’til the tree frogs went quiet and owls came out to fly. We left the cow at peace finally in the embers, started toward the house, walking slowly through the spreading weeds of our garden plot where nothing got planted this year.

P
elham came awake one night to find a naked man standing over his bed, growling. There was little light in the bedroom, but he could see one arm of the man from his shoulder to his wrist, a grim tattoo of something burning, a pale suggestion of bared teeth and taut lips. The growling was menacing and confused, with shrill rises, deep ferocity giving way to brief keening trills, a mangle of tones. Jill woke, too, looked at the man, then rolled from bed and fled screaming toward the next room. Pelham reached for the light on the nightstand but his fingers rattled a plate that shouldn’t have been there, and on the plate there lay a knife. The man stood still at the bottom of the bed, noisy and tall, a looming shadow inside the house that Pelham had to stand and fight, do what he could, stall for time and let Jill run, hide somewhere, since she must be what he’s after—why else would he be naked? But the man made no move to chase her, and didn’t lunge or leap onto Pelham like he could’ve, either, didn’t take control and clobber him senseless, but only stood there growling with his arms at his sides, hands held low, and Pelham quick got to him with the blade, planted steel in his chest. A popping sound came from inside the man’s ribs, and Pelham expected to be sliced in return now, maybe shot, but the man missed somehow, so close but he missed, and Pelham whipped in another stab and there came that plonk sound of striking a knothole hammering a nail, and the blade hung up in the ribs. The growls were weaker and calmer as Pelham twisted the blade, weaker and calmer, then the man’s arms collapsed onto Pelham, damp hands clasping Pelham’s shoulders as if to steady himself, hold himself upright, prevent himself from falling, and blood jumped from the chest wound, ran warm down Pelham’s belly. The ribs let the knife loose of a sudden and the overhead light flicked on as Pelham aimed the blade and he saw the man in a bright clear flash, a big handsome kid, shaved head, too many tats, his chest hole leaking breath and bubbling blood, but his hand didn’t halt. The kid’s neck burst open beneath his chin, Jill screamed again, hot flung blood in the eyes blinded Pelham as the kid’s arms squeezed about him, hugged him near, hugged him as they both fell to the floor and fell apart.

Blind yet, eyeballs rolling in the warm puddling, Pelham groped for a bedsheet. The kid’s bare feet were slapping the wood floor, slapping down hard like he was clambering to the crest of a hill that wasn’t there. Pelham blotted the blood from his eyes. Jill was weeping. The kid soon stilled, blue eyes open, footprints in red all around his body. The wind inside him escaped from ass and mouth. He never had said a word.

For weeks to come Pelham would wonder how that knife came to be on the nightstand. How did a knife that shouldn’t have been there happen to be there on this particular night? He tried to recall the preceding days backwards from the killing moment, to unravel the hours and find that knife. He didn’t eat before sleep anymore, acid reflux, so it wasn’t there to carve apples or slice cheese. They’d had guests a couple of nights ago, though, a few friends in for an evening of bourbon and smoked turkey, and he’d gone to bed pretty well lit—had he craved a snack to soak up the sour mash, fuck the reflux, and fallen asleep before fetching any? There was no sign of food on the empty plate. They’d gone after trout on the Spring River the day before that, fog in the bottoms and rainbows filling their creels—maybe he’d meant to fix something rent in the gear? Cut a tangle loose, trim a fly, fix a net, or perform some other mysterious household task he simply could not recall.

The house became crowded with cops. Pelham lived amidst woods and pastures, but the city limits had recently expanded to make him a West Table resident, so it was town cops in uniform and out clomping about, huddling to look down at the kid, studying the mess across the floor. Pelham sat on the bed with Jill beside him. He’d shook and shuddered for a while, waiting on the cops, trying not to look at the wounds, the open eyes and footprints, but having a surprise feeling sneak up on him, a creepy congratulatory glee, an animal gloat—Hey, I was attacked by a nameless intruder, fight to the finish, my foe now lays slain, a righteous kill. Sometimes a man will dream about a moment like this, an opportunity for sanctified violence, a time to open the cage and allow the sleeping thing inside out to eat its fill. A cop in a plaid shirt and Cardinals cap said, “Where’d his weapon fall to?”

“It was dark.”

“What’d he have?”

“Look under the bed, maybe.”

“You know, he shit on your leather chair downstairs.”

The leather recliner was Pelham’s inheritance, his father’s most cherished possession, and the shit was loose spatter and spread over the seat, one armrest. Two days later Pelham would give up trying to clean the leather, clean it enough to forget the spatter, and dragged the chair to the curb for the trash haulers to collect. Before nightfall he’d watched from the window as a man and two children pulled to the curb, checked the leather chair over, then excitedly jammed it into the trunk of their car and hurried away, grinning with the trunk lid bouncing. That was the first time Pelham caught himself speaking aloud to empty rooms, leaning against the window, watching his father’s chair disappear. “And fuck you for making me kill you.”

The cop said, “We found it outside, around the corner of the house, beside that big shrub. An ol’ single-action pistol. His clothes were there, piled nice, really, and the pistol was underneath. A pocketknife, too. His wallet’s got military ID in it, says his name is Randall Davies—know him?”

“I went to school with a guy named that.”

“Well, this one was a junior.”

The first time Pelham heard himself threatened was early that evening, in a convenience store when he and Jill went to buy more cleaning supplies. The bedroom floor was hardwood and the biggest puddle left an outline of blood that had settled into the grain like a birthmark and wouldn’t come off easily. There was only one other customer, a man in a green shirt with his name sewn above the heart pocket, and he was whispering with the clerk. Pelham and Jill came to stand behind him, holding scouring powder and Murphy soap and scrub pads. They heard the words “killed, stabbed like a hog in autumn” and knew they were under discussion. They remained silent, didn’t say a word, waited for the man to leave. As he left, the man spoke more loudly, “I been friends with that boy all his life, and if the law don’t do right to the son of a bitch, I know who will.” Jill started crying again on the way home, and when he pulled into the driveway she said, “Maybe that last stab could’ve been skipped, hon. The neck one.”

He was called to the police station the next morning. The sky was rumbling, stuffed with dark clouds, but only a thin sheen fell, raising oil slicks on the streets, shining the grass. The cops were named Olmstead and Johnson and led him to a private office. The room was painted a neutral sort of white, like the room could hold no opinions about anything one way or the other, and there was a tape recorder on the table. Olmstead said, “You’re certain sure you never did know him?”

“I could’ve seen him somewhere, but I don’t recall it.”

“His daddy knows who you are.”

“From school days.”

“And Jill, now, it couldn’t be she’d got acquainted with such a handsome young fella somewhere, could it?”

“He was kinda young, man, but thanks a shitload for putting that thought in my head.”

“So she might’ve?”

“Fuck you.”

Pelham had killed before. He’d been on Okinawa waiting to turn eighteen, a lance corporal, and the day after his birthday made him eligible for combat he was herded into a fat airplane and taken to Saigon. He didn’t know what was going on when he landed in Vietnam and didn’t when he left, either. Jarheads hanging around a gedunk, waiting for assignment, and a corporal told them they were lucky men; they were going to someplace in the south where there wasn’t much action to worry about. Everybody relaxed, tried to eat noodle soup with odd spoons they couldn’t make work, and wrote postcards home expressing relief or disappointment. The radio started crackling about noon, and more and more senior men gathered to listen as the next hour passed. Suddenly the corporal said they weren’t going where he’d thought, get on your feet. First chopper ride, a little airsick, flying north to a place under attack, a place with a name Pelham never did hear straight. They took fire coming in and two marines were hit and spread on the bulkhead. Pelham had blood on his face before he’d even landed at this place with a name he didn’t know. A harried captain acknowledged the fresh arrivals with an irritated wave, and a sergeant sent the Fucking New Guys downhill to the foxholes nearest the wire. Rainwater deepened in the holes; drizzle never stopped. The hills were steep and richly green; fog was alive and lowering until dark. There was a sniper everybody kept yelling about. Pelham did not know where he’d been sent or who he was with. The only name he’d caught was of a marine who’d died on the way in, Lazzaro from Texas. He did not have a clear idea about the shape or size of the base. He was mightily afraid he might shoot the wrong target in the dark, but he didn’t want to be hesitant. He didn’t know which way to run if it came to that or whose name to scream seeking help. Enemy troops breached the wire twice that night. Mortar rounds made the mud fly. Pelham shot and shot and shot every shadow that came near or seemed like it might. When he next understood where he was, he lay in a white bed on a hospital ship with a humming in his head that didn’t fade until he was home again. Sometime during his recovery he received the Purple Heart as a parting gift.

He’d served in Vietnam less than twenty-four hours and felt uncomfortable even mentioning that he’d been there, since other veterans always asked, Remember Mama something-or-other’s joint on the road to Marble Mountain? Di di mau? Beans-and-motherfuckers? The way the gals in black pajamas’d yank one leg up high and pee out the side? No no no no. You’re a bullshitter, then, ’cause if you were there, Jody, you’d know them things. A year after his return Pelham ceased to mention Vietnam to new acquaintances, dropped it from the biography of himself he’d give if asked. Only those who knew him before he went were certain that he’d gone. Jill was a second wife, fifteen years his junior, a lovely, patient blonde, and remembered Vietnam as a tiresome old television show that’d finally been cancelled about the time she left third grade. She touched Pelham’s scars but didn’t ask for details.

That weather, that look, a forest in fog, a faint drizzle and no sky, always took him back to his foxhole in a place he couldn’t name. Such weather often lay over the mountain rivers where he and Jill went fishing, and the next time they went the sky spread low and gray over the bottoms and he could smell foreign mud and old fear. Jill stood knee-deep in the flow, facing upstream from Pelham all morning, silent and tense, then finally turned downstream and said, “No. No, I never did.”

For two days they received threats by telephone, and Pelham would listen to the harsh plans for his body parts and sorry soul and quietly say, “You might be right, man, come on over.” A car drove by a couple of times with young voices screaming something unintelligible but loud and angry. Then a long follow-up article in the town paper made the facts of the case obvious and nobody much blamed Pelham anymore. A day later there was an obituary of Randall Davies Jr.—a lifelong member of the Front Street Church of Christ, avid quail hunter, top rebounder on the West Table High basketball team, best buddy to his sisters Chrystal and Joy, a proud member of the First Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq, where he attained the rank of corporal, beloved of many. Jill taped the obit to the refrigerator door so they might slowly come to understand something crucial from regularly looking into the kid’s face.

If they snacked at the small kitchen table, the face would be above and between them. It was his boot camp photograph, him wearing dress blues, the white hat and brass insignia, a blank, regimented expression. They’d watch the face as they sliced their food and chewed. Studying that face forced the conversation into certain directions. Pelham might ask yet again, “Why ever’d he leave his weapons outside?”

“And why come in here naked?”

“Why shit on Daddy’s chair? Why do that?”

“Contempt, hon. I think that means contempt.”

“He never even threw a punch.”

When Pelham cursed aloud in empty rooms, he knew he was talking to the marine he’d killed. He thought of him as Junior, and interrogated him in his mind, sometimes shook or slapped him. How’d you happen to pick my door? This road is not the route to anywhere special, Junior, ain’t no popular taverns, or skating rinks, or Lovers’ Lanes, or anything out this way—you’ve got to want to get here to get here. Junior never answered, and Jill was unnerved when she came upon Pelham standing in the living room addressing a closet door, “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”

“Hon? Hon?”

“I’m after answers, that’s what.”

In the night Pelham would rise from bed and patrol the perimeter. He’d sneak through his house in his underwear, carrying an ax handle he’d brought in from the garage. He’d check doors, listen for sounds that might not be benign, creep to a window and peer between the blinds, stand at the empty spot where his father’s chair belonged, with the ax handle drawn back to swing. He’d repeat his patrol several times in succession before relaxing a bit, and at some point Jill usually joined him in the darkness.

“All clear?”

“Maybe.”

On a bright morning outside Kenny’s Walleye Restaurant, Pelham finally bumped into Randall Davies Sr. He stood in the parking lot and felt great relief. Randall and his wife stared a moment, then Randall said, “I thought you’d come by before now.”

The men started to shake hands, then stalled, averted their glances, let their hands fall to their sides. Mrs. Davies stepped forward, a tall and very thin woman who’d been several grades behind the men in school, and said, “I know you had the right—but I just can’t look at your face. I just can’t do it.” She walked to Kenny’s and went inside, and Randall raised his hand again, and this time they shook. He said, “She can’t stand knowin’ how wrong things got to be with him. How lost to us.”